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LegiStorm Casts Rain Clouds in D.C.

A website called LegiStorm is creating a major tempest on Capitol Hill. The Hill's Susan Crabtree reported that congressional aides are raising hell over the site, which posts personal and financial disclosures that the aides are required to make, including salaries, addresses, and investments. The information has technically been available to the public for many years now; LegiStorm just makes it far easier to access.

Senior aides raised the issue at a meeting earlier this week and may protest by refusing to file their disclosure forms by the next deadline, May 15. Some staffers are worried they're now easy targets for identity theft and other crimes (one blamed the site for a burglary at his home), and are even demanding that the government sue LegiStorm. Others think the disclosure system in general needs reforming to bring it in line with Internet technology.LegiStorm is already proving useful to government watchdogs. Crabtree, who told me the site was an "important research tool," used it to discover a campaign-spending irregularity on the part of John Murtha's chief of staff. Back in 2007, a Talking Points Memo reader used LegiStorm to apparently out Dick Cheney's entire payroll for the first time.

LegiStorm has been posting salaries for several years now, but it started posting full financial disclosures only a few weeks ago, precipitating the current controversy. Jock Friedly, the site's founder, says LegiStorm has done "an extraordinary number of things" to protect the privacy of staffers—"removing investment-account numbers, bank-account numbers, and social-security numbers." Pointing to the labor-intensive nature of the operation and saying its revenues are negligible, he proposes that aides cover the cost of redacting specific information: "We'd be happy to remove anything that doesn't prevent people from knowing the kind of information that these forms were designed for, like what investments they have, what lobbying firms they're attached to, what gifts they've received."

OpenSecrets spokesman Massie Ritsch says, "Congress doesn't do a great job of making its own information available. It's important to know staff members' financial situations, because they hold such influence over the people they work for, over policy and legislation. In some ways they're more influential in the nitty-gritty of laws, where the funny business is most likely to occur, than the elected members of Congress are." The issue of staff disclosures is a crucial part of the debate over Congressional ethics reform.

One Senate staff member of three years whom I talked to had another use for the site. "I've used LegiStorm before when I've been angling for promotions or looking at other jobs," she says. "I've been able to look at my peers on other staffs and see how much they are paid."

You can read one email that Friedly received from an irate staffer, Pennsylvania representative Bill Shuster's chief of staff Jeff Loveng, here. "I hope you savor this time in your life where you feel you have other people at your mercy while you conduct your witch hunt," Loveng wrote. "Because the recent events of the man you appear to admire, Governor Eliot Spitzer show–[sic] you may some day find yourself as the Emperor with no clothes."

If it matters at all, Friedly reveals all kinds of things about his own life on his personal website. But if you try to look at his photo albums, you'll be disappointed—they're password-protected.